Kubuntu on Titanium PowerBook G4

[galvatron1983]

Ive manged to pick up an 867Mhz Titanium PowerBook G4 on Ebay. Its a beautiful machine, perhaps the best designed mac laptop, and its a great compliment to my MacBook.

Im considering running Kubuntu PPC on the Titanium and I was just wondering if anybody is using Kubuntu on Titaniums and can tell me what the performance is like, and if there are any problems running it that Id need to know about.

My specs are 867Mhz PPC G4, 60GB HD, 1GB Ram, ATi Radeon 32MB graphics.

[driven1]

I just loaded Gusty on my tibook (same specs) a couple of weeks ago in a dual boot setup. There is an ongoing issue with sound not working on the tibooks though I think there is a work around available. I can't get the wake up from hibernation to work, but then again, that doesn't always work under OS X either. For the most part, I am pleased with the performance. I am posting from Kubuntu right now. I guess it depends on what uses you have planned for it. Obviously, processor intensive work is going to be much faster on the Macbook, but for general web, email, and office use Kubuntu is great. Others on this forum will have more experience than me.

[stmiller]

I use Kubuntu 7.10 on an 867Mhz Tibook. Sleep works fine for me, out of the box. I use a pre-2.6.20 kernel to have sound. Wireless is only 802.11b but works fine.

3D works surprisingly well. Well enough for neverball and so forth. I had the Beryl stuff working at one point, but have turned it all off as it was somewhat buggy for me.

[galvatron1983]

Originally Posted by stmiller I use Kubuntu 7.10 on an 867Mhz Tibook. Sleep works fine for me, out of the box. I use a pre-2.6.20 kernel to have sound. Wireless is only 802.11b but works fine. 3D works surprisingly well. Well enough for neverball and so forth. I had the Beryl stuff working at one point, but have turned it all off as it was somewhat buggy for me.

Does wireless work out of the box? I know there were lots of issues with broadcom drivers on previous releases of Kubuntu. Has this been fixed with 7.10?

[stmiller]

Originally Posted by galvatron1983 Does wireless work out of the box? I know there were lots of issues with broadcom drivers on previous releases of Kubuntu. Has this been fixed with 7.10?

The Titanium Powerbook uses the Airport (original) card which is an orinoco card. This card is fully supported in Linux. (out of the box)

The broadcom one is the Airport Express card in newer macs. And there have been major fixes so broadcom works great in Gutsy as some have reported.

[driven1]

Wireless works OOB.

I tried loading an earlier kernel last night but got errors before the job was completed. Still no sound

Guess I'll try again tonight. I found easy to follow guides through the PPC FAQ to fine tune the 3D, I can't find it right now, but if anyone needs it I'll look. Video in general, works much better for me in Gutsy than it did in earlier versions.

[stmiller]

One big difference is that in Linux powernowd supports scaling the CPU down on these Powerbooks automatically. So it increases the cpu speed when you need it, and turns it down when you don't. OS X Tiger does not support this feature for some reason. With OS X it's either set to high or low and remains fixed there.

[Spirale23]

Installed Hardy on a Tibook 800 - all very good , including sound and wifi ...

just apart a weird screen at opening and some few issue with compiz and mac-on-linux ... everything's grand !